The Air Force has passed the point where more cannot be done with less. The Trump administration and Congress need to sufficiently resource the Air Force. It has been underfunded for over three decades.

I love how you can receive hundreds of billions in funding and apparently still be underfunded Now, normally a lot of this stuff is just MIC ghouls propagandizing to get even more funding, but it is indeed the case that the US military is having problems actually keeping aircraft functional, and as seen now are having to get rid of whole Air Force units, so clearly all that money isn’t going in the right places…

Left unchecked, what happened to the 104th Fighter Squadron will be repeated elsewhere around the nation and at key Air Force bases abroad. Proof of the Air Force’s capacity crunch is in the numbers. In fiscal 2025, the service sought to divest 250 aircraft but only procure 91 new ones. In the fiscal 2026 budget submission, they requested to retire 340 aircraft but only buy 76 replacement aircraft. Bombers and fighters took the brunt of these cuts in the decades following the Cold War. Air Force aircraft inventories today stand at half of what they were when the Berlin Wall fell. Fighters are now undergoing a new round of cuts because aircraft procured during President Ronald Reagan’s build-up during the 1980s are now at the end of their service lives.

From a pragmatic vantage, this is why in 2022 the Air Force sunset F-15C/Ds assigned to the 18th Fighter Wing at Kadena Air Base in Japan without permanently assigned backfill aircraft. This is one of the most important geostrategic locations in the world given its proximity to China and the Air Force now rotates other units through this location to maintain presence. Permanently assigned aircraft are years away given slow buy rates. It is also why the Air Force Reserve is sunsetting nearly 50% of its fighter capacity between now and 2030 due to a lack of backfill aircraft to replace retiring older types. Affected locations include Homestead Air Reserve Base, Florida; Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona; Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri; and Moody Air Force Base, Georgia. Also on this list is the Air Force Reserve aggressor squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, which is crucial element of front-line training for the entire force.

As a result of the Air Force’s capacity woes, the service increasingly lacks the aircraft necessary to execute a campaign for any length of time if called upon to do so. Operation Midnight Hammer, the U.S. military’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, was a magnificent demonstration of Air Force capabilities, but it was a one-off event. The service could not have accomplished the same strike package the next day. To put it in historic terms, Midnight Hammer mirrored the Doolittle Raid — an impressive achievement, but far from a war-winning demonstration of decisive combat power at scale. That came later in WWII, after the U.S. spooled up its industrial base and training pipeline to facilitate the Combined Bomber Offensive — the Allies’ relentless and costly campaign of sending wave after wave of bombers to strike Axis industrial sites in Europe — and mass air operations around the world. Numbers matter. As an indicator of the serious gap between the Air Force we need and the Air Force as budgeted, service leaders have long said that they need to procure 72 fighters per year just to stop the decline in fighter average age. The fiscal 2026 budget requested just 45. That’s why units will keep closing — it is simple math.

The solution to this challenge is quite simple: The Air Force needs to be sufficiently resourced to buy combat aircraft at scale.

it’s simple! just select your “airbase” building, and click the “build fighter” button a bunch of times!

Anticipating this recapitalization window, service leaders and industry spent the past few decades developing next generation aircraft like the F-35, F-15EX, F-47, Collaborative Combat Aircraft, B-21, E-7, EA-37B, KC-46, T-7, MH-139 and HH-60W. The value of these programs will only be realized if they are rapidly procured in high volume. Past leaders, like President Reagan, understood the need to invest in decisive airpower. The mantle now falls on President Donald Trump and Congress. The need for these aircraft is not theoretical. With China pressing hard in the Pacific, Russia at war in Ukraine, Iran still committed to destabilizing the Middle East, North Korea standing as a very dangerous nuclear adversary and homeland defense an increasingly crucial mission given modern threats, the need for Air Force airpower is at a historic high. Adversaries know the Air Force is stretched thin and this undoubtedly enters their calculus as they decide how to challenge U.S. interests around the world. Losing the deterrent edge stands as one of the biggest risks facing the nation. It is always in America’s interest to secure its interests by harnessing peace through strength. That requires a renewed investment in Air Force capacity.

AUSA 2025 — After decades of stagnation, America’s ammunition industry is beginning to boom again, according to a senior Army official. New production sites are popping up around the country as $5.5 billion in funding — appropriated over the last three years in response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine — finally percolates through the contracting process, said the two-star general in charge of inter-service ammunition production. “I’ve had the privilege of doing nine ribbon-cutting ceremonies here in the last year,” Maj. Gen. John Reim, the Joint Program Executive Officer for Armaments and Ammunition (JPEO-A&A), told the Association of the US Army conference here on Wednesday. “We’re bringing new capabilities online. We’re replacing legacy production methods. … Most of our facilities, they date back to World War II.”

The bad news? The new, more flexible facilities are just starting to ramp up — and the ones that exist are overwhelmingly focused on one type of ammunition: the 155 mm howitzer rounds that proved crucial in the early phases of the Ukrainian war. Production of these artillery shells has surged from 14,000 rounds per month in early 2022, which was just enough to cover what the Army and Marine Corps typically expended in training, to 40,000 a month by late 2024. That’s still well short of the Army’s objective of 100,000 a month. “Those facilities are just now coming online. We’re just hitting stride with first article tests and transitioning to full rate production,” Reim said during the panel discussion at AUSA. “[And] probably 95 percent of the money that’s come into us has been targeted for 155. … We’re laser focused on artillery.”

over 5 billion bucks, 3 years and you’ve, what, maybe tripled monthly 155mm shell production (assuming there’s been some further increase past that 40k number now that we’re in late 2025), to an amount that gets expended in a few days in Ukraine? wow, such industrial power!

Meanwhile, other types of ammunition, from mortar shells to tank rounds, aren’t getting anywhere near the same investment. One partial exception is a pair of new facilities to make 6.8 mm rifle rounds for the Army’s new M-7 Next Generation Squad Weapon and M250 light machinegun: “We’re going to be in a good spot with 6.8 ammunition going forward with both Lake City and Sig Sauer doing production,” Reim said.

Beyond 155: Flexible Production

But while the US is ramping up 155 mm ammo production, Reim warned that the nature of war is continuously changing, pointing to the new ubiquity of small attack drones on the frontlines in Ukraine. When it comes to predicting the needs of future conflicts, Reim said, “the Army’s gotten it wrong 100 percent of the time.” That’s why the nation needs not just more ammunition production capacity, but more flexible facilities, Reim emphasized to Breaking Defense in a sidebar conversation after the panel. The majority of the infrastructure still dates to World War II, when efficiency meant building factories that specialized in cranking out one specific product in staggering quantities. Modern conflict changes too fast for that approach, Reim argued. Fortunately, modern manufacturing technology can adapt fast enough to keep up with it. “Right, now we’ve got one-trick ponies in existing facilities that are optimized to produce at scale, and so when we’re not producing at scale, they’re very inefficient,” Reim told Breaking Defense. “We need this modular, flexible production capability that can support a surge.”

At a cutting-edge ammunition plant, Reim continued, “I’ve got the flexibility to pivot between a 60 mm mortar and 81 [mm mortar], 120 [mm tank rounds], 105 [mm], 155 [mm]. I’ve got that with a simple software change and minor tooling changes.” The showpiece for this new approach is the Universal Artillery Project Lines (UAPL) facility formally opened in Mesquite, Texas last year, which is initially focused on making the metal parts for 155 mm shells, but in theory can switch to 60 mm mortars or any caliber in between. Unfortunately, UAPL’s technology has proved as ambitious as its name, and contractor General Dynamics has struggled to get all three lines running properly. The problem became so acute that in June, the Army sent an official “show cause” letter warning the company the service would “consider terminating” GD’s contract to run UAPL unless it shaped up ASAP. (At the time, a spokesperson for General Dynamic declined to comment on the letter, deferring to the Army.) “In Mesquite … we’re working through some challenges [and a] stop-work,” Reim acknowledged when he spoke to Breaking Defense this week. “But we’ve got a tiger team [working to] baseline where we’re at today [and] what do you need to do to get this operational.”

One recurring difficulty at the new facilities, Reim said, is the need to import crucial equipment from specialized manufacturers with limited capacity and large backlogs. “At Mesquite, there’s a lot of Turkish equipment, [specifically] free flow forming technology — say that three times fast,” Reim said. “We just don’t make a lot of stuff in the US anymore. When we look at the equipment that goes in these facilities that’s not sitting in a shelf at Costco, right? They’re long-lead items.”

Leader compares mobilization to the Internationalist Brigade of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s,

The national leader of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), João Pedro Stédile, stated that popular movements in Latin America are coordinating to send brigades of activists to Venezuela in solidarity with the country’s government and people in the face of threats of military intervention by the United States. The announcement was made in an interview with Conexão BdF, on Rádio Brasil de Fato.

“We, the movements of Latin America, will hold meetings and are already consulting with each other to organize, as soon as possible, internationalist brigades of militants from each of our countries to go to Venezuela and place ourselves at the disposal of the Venezuelan government and people,” Stédile said. The decision was made during the World Congress in Defense of Mother Earth in Caracas, which brought together delegations from 65 countries last week.

According to him, the initiative seeks to repeat the “historic epic” of the global left during the Spanish Civil War, between 1936 and 1939, when militants from various countries went to Spain to defend the Republic. “Are we going to engage in combat? Of course not! We have no military training for that, nor should we. The Venezuelan people know how to defend themselves, but we, with the militants, can do a thousand and one things, from planting beans and cooking food for the soldiers to standing by the people if there is a military invasion by the US,” he said.

Stédile criticized the administration of President Donald Trump, which, in his assessment, has resumed the “coup offensive” against Nicolás Maduro. “He’s a mix of crazy and fascist. He thinks that with brute force, he can overthrow the Maduro government and hand it over to María Corina [Machado, the main opposition leader in Venezuela],” he said ironically. He believes that the Venezuelan government “has never had so much popular support” and “is not afraid of an American invasion.”

The MST leader also called for a firmer stance from the Brazilian government in the face of escalating tensions. “I think the Lula administration is not realizing the gravity of the situation. It is time to take more decisive action. If it does not want to expose itself alone, it can issue a joint statement with Mexico and Colombia, which have already spoken out against the United States’ aggression,” he suggested.